Both images are classic, 'though not especially exciting or interesting studies in depth of field. While I'm not a fan of the angles, that's a personal choice. I will say that while both are significantly under-exposed, your monochrome conversion seems well done. Even though you've used a large aperture and have a shallow DoF, be cognizant of your backgrounds; there is still enough detail in #2 to make the background quite distracting.
It looks like there's enough detail that you will be able to do some reasonable edits with levels/curves in Photoshop, but really, the best thing you can do is to get the exposure correct at the time you take the shot.